Prime

With a feeling of shame, we drove west from Georgia
to the end of America, holing up with the ex-lover
of John Wesley’s mother, a frayed Victorian on Puget Sound.

The mold in the house made it hard to breathe or sleep.
Worn out from insomnia and all that driving I forgot
what defines a prime number; is it indivisible

by any number but itself? I could’ve looked it up
but that’s not the same as knowing. My confusion was the number one—
why is one excluded from the set of primes—it seems arbitrary

as if one’s singular line were shameful.
I recall myself
as leaves drift across a frozen road.

The past is a prime number, divisible by nothing but itself,
and the only pure way to the real.
Like a nervous habit, I return

to nothing left over. 
One should be counted as a prime,
indissoluble at it is, so deeply joined to its noun,

like the tree shading a cousin’s doomed wedding,
or the shopping mall cafeteria where she and I swallowed salt and grease
when we were eleven and prime.